I wanted to enjoy this
concert, but ultimately found that expectations exceeded reality. It is
perfectly likely, of course, that I simply did not properly understand or even
appreciate the works performed, all of which I was encountering for the first
time. It is even possible that they may have been left down in performance,
though I doubt it; insofar as I could ascertain, the players of the Kairos Quartet
and the Südwestfunk Experimental Studio offered committed advocacy. Yet, on a
first hearing, I cannot say that I was entirely convinced by two out of the
three pieces for string quartet and electronics.

Georg Friedrich Haas’s Fourth
String Quartet was, according to the programme, his first work to employ
electronics; I had a slight sense that it might have been out of duty rather
than powerful inclination; indeed, there seemed to be something rather dated
about the practice, which though ‘live’, had an air of early, 1950s tape experiments
rather than the first decade of the twenty-first century. Much of the first
half of the work was a story of gradual transformation, though the pace of that
transformation picked up somewhat with time. A surprisingly lyrical section,
initiated by viola, offered some respite from what was beginning to sound
merely grey. (Try to imagine electronic, microtonal Hindemith Gebrauchsmusik.) Sections were clearly demarcated and, at least in
retrospect, the work’s architecture was readily discernible, but drama tended
to come from the ‘effect’ of the electronics rather than anything more
intrinsic to the material. Or perhaps I was just missing the point.

Marco Stroppa’s Spirali plays, as its title suggests,
with spirals in spatial form, as realised by electronics. It seemed to me a far
more interesting work. Electronics sounded more integral to the experience, and
from the very outset; the material itself, apparently derived from a latent
chorale, also seemed to be of greater interest. There was certainly a greater
sense of drama and of the material being in flux. One could even experience
intensity simply from watching the sound engineers, let alone from hearing. The
‘involved’ quality of the music at some points, even if only coincidentally,
might have been glancing back to Schoenberg’s quartet writing. There were,
then, complexity, expressiveness, and complexity in and of expression, aided
and furthered by ‘voices’ emanating from electronics. The magical conclusion
might almost have been said to have possessed an air of spectralism.

Roberto David Rusconi’s De imago (Materia) Sonora also made
fuller use of electronics, indeed arguably more so still, and again from the
outset. Rusconi’s work, receiving its first performance, gave a strong
sense of ‘landscape’, not necessarily as opposed to a journey through time,
though not necessarily unopposed to it either. As with Haas’s work, however,
the quartet as a whole sounded very sectional. Though full of incident, it was
unclear to me quite how it all added up. Perhaps, however, I was again merely
missing the point.